Lucky # Slevin: (2006. dir: Paul McGuigan) Remember that guy Josh Hartnett? The first time I saw him, in the Faculty, I thought, man, this cat is going to be a MOVIE STAR, and made a mental note to keep an eye on him, observe his ascension into the heavens of cinematic immortality. Then he made the Virgin Suicides and I was like, yup, yup, here we go, hold on tight.
And then? Nothing. I mean, he was in Black Hawk Down, but so was everybody else, and everybody else didn't make Pearl Harbor the same year, a maleficent blot on the resume which spreads its spoiling stain across many an otherwise redemptive virtue.
I mean, this kid had everything: talent, looks, charisma, sex appeal, subtlety, chops. Was it a bad agent? an inability to cope with the crippling demands of good fortune in Hollywood (which, I believe, are many and often unbearable to those unfortunates born with talent and ambition but without a particular rhinosaurus-hide gene)? The killing blow came when he made, back to back, the appalling 40 Days and 40 Nights and Hollywood Homicide, a movie with a title so lame that I wouldn't watch it if it was serving a full all-you-can-eat buffet of all my favorite actors including Peter O'Toole when he was 25 and the long-dead Zbigniew Cybulski and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
My hopes, then, were slim for Lucky # Slevin, particularly since I tend to harbor suspicions towards the too-clever and too-hip cinema. This one, it turns out, is pretty good. It resides in the Usual Suspects category of trickster ventures, movies in which narrators may be unreliable and so the writer has to be very, very generous towards his audience to ensure that we do not feel duped in the end, but pleasantly surprised. This one was, and I was indeed pleasantly surprised.
It's chock full of good performances, my favorite being by Mykelti Williamson, almost unrecognisable in a small role as a simple-minded thug.
*SPOILER ALERT*
the First Power: (1990. dir: Robert Resnikoff) Forget 1990. This schlock has '80s written all over it, from the dread-filled Stewart Copeland synth-track to the cute-instead-of-sexy heroine with the massive shoulder-pads to the satanic-panic plotline. And, within those claustrophobic bounds, it is enjoyable. The plot makes no sense, none, and the characters never spring into life. There is not a single set that does not feel like a set, rather than a real place where real things happen, from dwellings to crime scenes ("We'll have a guy trampled by a horse-drawn carriage on Olvera Street, and they gotta find a crucified body suspended in the girders above the Los Angeles River") to the bar they stop into so the too-twee heroine can establish herself some street cred as a heavy drinker.
The thing it's got are some interesting performances. Williamson, for whom I watched it, sees his talents utterly wasted but is good-natured in his attempts as the cop's partner in the red shirt, doomed from the word "go" by his friendly disposition and lack of darkness. Poor fellow has to say things like "kiss my black ass," all the stuff the cop-partner had to say back in the '80s, and then he suffers an awkward and ignominious death scene.
One of the best performances is by Jeff Kober, hard-working journeyman actor who would later feature in Joss Whedon's stable in a rare, two-character run in Buffy: first as the mad vamp Zachary Kralik whom Buffy tricks into drinking holy water, later as the magic-pusher Rack who leads Willow down the slippery slope deeper into her addiction. (He's still working: he's been a regular on Sons of Anarchy recently.) In this, he plays the evil serial killer who is so beloved of Satan that he has been gifted with what the Catholic Church (allegedly) terms The First Power: the power of Resurrection. You see where I'm going with this? Once super-cop Russ Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) captures him and sees him executed, he returns, more powerfully than ever, and seeking vengeance against our hero! The Church, in fact, plays an interesting role in this movie, a role that was common in the 80s but has since mellowed. It begins with a (visionary? or plain nuts?) nun warning the cynical cardinals that Satan is afoot in these murders, and, later, when push comes to shove, she steals a "treasured religious icon" --a dagger disguised as a crucifix, I kid you not,-- with which the mad demonic entity can finally be sent to hell where he belongs.
The other very fine performance is a one-scene wonder by TV actress Julianna McCarthy as the dead killer's grandmother. In an excruciatingly badly-written five minutes, we discover that the killer was the seed of his grandfather's rape of his mother, all embarrassingly badly done, except for this woman, whose dignity and clarity of choice convey not only truth but a certain enigmatic creepiness.
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